[CIRP Note: This file contains the entry for
"Circumcision" from the ninth edition of the
Encyclopædia Britannica, which was published in 1876.
The author is the Reverend T. K. Cheyne of Balliol College,
Oxford. The text is found in the Fifth Volume, pages
789-791.]

CIRCUMCISION. The importance of this rite is
so largely due to its quasi-sacramental character in Judaism,
that any inquiry into its history and meaning must be
prefaced by a reference to the Old Testament.
I. There are three
distinct narratives in the sacred literature of the Jews
which claim to be considered. It is related in Gen. xvii.
that when Abram the Hebrew was ninety-nine years of age, he
became a party on behalf of himself and his descendants to a
covenant with his God. Of this covenant the sign and
condition was circumcision, which was directed to be
performed (a peculiarity of Judaism) on the eighth day after
the child’s birth. Is this account, we may ask, based
on a historical tradition ? If so, the circumcision of the
Israelites is entirely unconnected with that of other nations
unless indeed other nations have borrowed theirs from the
Israelites. This has actually been maintained in the case of
the Egyptians by Archdeacon Hardwicke, but the theory is not
only improbable in itself, considering the imitative
character of the Israelites, and their low importance in
Egypt (Gen. xlvi. 34), but contrary to the evidence of the
Egyptian monuments (see below). If, as has been supposed by
some, the document to which Gen. xvii. belongs is of
post-captivity origin, this would put it out of court as a
witness to the popular tradition of the Hebrews. But there is
another narrative, apparently of a more archaic complexion,
which leads to a directly opposite historical result. We read
in Exod. iv. 25, 26, that when Moses was returning from
Midian to Egypt, he was in danger of his life owing to the
neglect of circumcision in his family. “And
Zipporah,” his Midianitish wife, “took a sharp
stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at
his feet, and said, Sure a khatan (Auth. Vers.,
‘husband’) of blood art thou to me ; so he (sc.,
the offended deity) desisted from him. At that time she said,
a khathan of blood with reference to the
circumcision.” The meaning of the story can still be
discerned. Khathan, or khatan, meant originally
not “husband” (as Auth. Vers. of Exodus), nor
“son-in-law” (as in ordinary Arabic), but a
“a newly-admitted member of the family.” This
appears from the sense of Arab. khatana “to
provide a wedding-feast,” and khatana, “to
give or receive a daughter in marriage.” So that in the
sense of the old Hebrew tradition, “a khathan of
blood meant “one who has become a khathan, not
by marriage but by circumcision,” a meaning which is
still further confirmed by the derived sense of Arab.
khatana “to circumcise,” circumcision
being performed in Arabia at the age of puberty. To sum
up:—an Arabian woman plays the chief part in the story,
and her words are only explicable from the Arabic ; it is far
from improbable that Yahweh (or Jehovah) was himself first
made known to the Jews in Arabia (comp. Judg. v. 4, Hab. iii.
3) ; putting all which together, we obtain a strong case for
the hypothesis of the Arabian origin of Jewish
circumcision.
The third narrative is
Josh. v. 2-9, where Joshua is said to have circumcised the
children of Israel a second time with “ knives of
stone,” and have thus “rolled away the reproach
of Egypt from them.” It is not unnatural that this
should have been used by some to confirm the view of an
Egyptian origin of circumcision, among others by Dr Ebers,
whe refers to the additional words in the Septuagint, Josh.
xxiv. 31, “ There they buried with him. . . . . the
stone knives with which he had circumcised the children of
Israel in Gilgal.” But, first, with regard to his
singular statement of the Alexandrine version, it must
henceforth be abandoned by all scholars. It is simply an
unscientific attempt to account for the existence near
Joshua’s supposed tomb of flint instruments, such as
those discovered by M. Guérin on this very site. It
need hardly be added that the flint instruments discovered by
the French savant were really pre-historic ; they
consist not only of knives, but of saws, which would have
been available for the purpose ascribed to Joshua (see Burton
and Drake’s Unexplored Syria, ii, 295-300). And,
secondly, Bishop Colenso has shown some reason for the
suspicion that verses 2 to 8 (not verse 9) are later
additions to the narrative, in which case the “
reproach of Egypt” means, not the state of
uncircumcision, but the contempt of the Egyptians so forcibly
expressed in Exod. xxxii. 12, Num. Xiv. 13-16. As for the
“ knives of stone ” (comp. Josh. xxiv. 31,
Sept.), on which Ebers has laid some stress, such implements
are not distinctively Egyptian, if they were even employed at
all by the Egyptians for the purpose of circumcision. It is
true that Herodotus (ii. 104, comp. Diod. Sic., i. 28)
asserts the Egyptian origin of circumcision to have been
admitted in Palestine, but he is probably right on so far as
the Phœnicians or Canaanites are concerned.
II. We may now proceed
to consider circumcision from an ethnographical point of
view. It was not a specially Semitic rite, being only known
to the southern and western Semites, who probably derived it
directly or indirectly from the Egyptians, if not from some
entirely non-Semitic source. Though not referred to in the
Koran, it was a primitive Arabian custom to circumcise youths
at their entrance on puberty (i.e., between their tenth and
fifteenth year), as appears not only from Gen. xvii. 25, Jos.
Antiq., i. 12, 2, but from the express statement of
Ibn-al-Athir (quoted by Pococke, Specimen Hist.
Arabum, p. 319), which is confirmed by a remarkable
passage in the life of the old Arabian poet Dhû-l-isba
(Zeitschr. F. d. Kunde des Morgenlandes, iii. 230).
From Arabia it was carried by the preachers of Islam to
Persia, India, and Turkey ; from Arabia, too, as we have
seen, it probably came in remote times to the Israelites. The
circumcision of the Phœnicians or Canaanites has been
disputed, but is attested by Herodotus (ii. 104), and is
confirmed by the story in Gen. xxxiv., as also by the fact
that the term of contempt, “the uncircumcised,”
is reserved in the Old Testament for the Philistines. The
rite seem, however, to have fallen into disuse in later times
in Phœnicia as well as in Egypt ( Dr Ebers refers to
the uncircumcised figures on the stele of Pianchi, comp. also
Herod. L. c., Jos. Antiq., viii. 10, 3,
Contr. Ap. i. 22, and perhaps Ezek, xxxii. 24, 30),
which may partly account for its being afterwards regarded as
distinctive of the Jews. The Egyptians, too, were
circumcised, and that prior to the immigration of the Hebrews
(Wilkinson), as appears from the representations on the very
earliest monuments. The most striking of these is the sceneon
a bas-relief discovered in the temple of Chunsu at Karnak, a
drawing of which is given by M. Chabas and Dr. Ebers. Their
age, says Dr Ebers, must be between six and ten, which agrees
with the present custom in Egypt, where, as Mr Lane tells us,
circumcision is generally performed in the fifth or sixth
year, though often postponed by peasants to the twelfth,
thirteenth, or even fourteenth year (Modern Egyptians,
i. 71). It has often been asserted that only the priests
underwent the operation, but there is no earlier evidence for
this than that of Origen (ed. Lommatzsch, iv. 138), in whose
time it is quite possible that the Egyptians, like the later
Jews, sought to evade a peculiarity which exposed them to
ridicule and contempt.
But the rite of
circumcision is known among nations which cannot be suspected
of communication with Egypt. Similar causes produce similar
effects all the world over. It was in use in some form among
the ancient civilized peoples of Central America, though this
is better attested of the Nahua branch (including the Aztecs)
than of the Maya (Bancroft, Native Races, vol. iii.)
It is still kept up among the Teamas and Manaos on the Amazon
; also among three different races in the South Seas, among
most of the tribes of Australia, among the Papuans, the New
Caledonians, and the inhabitants of the New Hebrides. It is
widely spread in Africa, especially among the Kaffir tribes.
Among the Bechuanas the boys who are circumcised form a sort
of society, for which among other reasons, Waltz conjectures
that the Bechuanas communicated the rite to the other
Kaffirs. Prichard (Physical History of Mankind, ii.
287) rightly dismisses the idea that the Kaffirs borrowed the
rite from Mahometan nations, though the progress of Islam
will help to account for its prevalence in other parts of
Africa.
III. Very different
views were held in antiquity as to the meaning of the rite of
circumcision. There was a myth common to Egypt and
Phœnicia, though not of very ancient date in its extant
Egyptian form, which seems to bring circumcision into
connection with the Sun-god. In the Book of the Dead,
chap. Xvii., we read of the “ blood which proceeded
from the limb of the god Ra, when he wished to cut
himself,” which the late Vicomte de Rougé
interpreted, with much plausibility, of circumcision
(Revue archéologique, nouveau série, i.
244). And in a fragment of the Philonian Sanchoniathon
(Fragmenta Historicorum Grœcorum, ed.
Müller, iii, 568, 569), we find a similar tale of El
circumcising his father Uranos, or, according to another
version, himself, and the blood flowing into the springs and
rivers. Space forbids us to discuss the bearings of this
myth. Herodotus (ii. 37) ascribes the Egyptian custom to the
motive of cleanliness (καθαριοτητος
εινεκα) This
is also one of the four causes reported on the authority of
tradition by Philo the Jew (Opera, ed. Mangey, ii.
210), the three others being avoidance of carbuncle, the
symbolizing of purity of heart, and the attainment of
numerous offspring. Mere cleanliness, however, seems hardly
an adequate motive for the practice. Sanitary reasons seem
much more probable, judging from the well-ascertained
physical advantages of circumcision to the Jewish race. But
even this is not a complete explanation. Why was the practice
adopted by some nations and not others ? The most scientific
theory is that which refers it to a religious instinct common
to all nations, though not always expressing itself in the
same way, and this seems to be at least obscurely indicated
by the tradition of the Israelites. The prophet Jeremiah (ix.
25,26), too puts it in the same class with cutting off of the
hair (comp. Herod. iii. 8), which, like other bodily
mutilations, has been shown to be of the nature of a
representative sacrifice (Tylor’s Primitive
Culture, ii. 363, 364). The principle of substitution was
familiar to all ancient nations, and not least to the
Israelites. Witness the story of Gen. xxii., the pascal lamb,
and the redemption of the first-born by an offering (Exod.
xiii. 11-16), and compare the similar phrase ascribed to Saul
in 1 Sam. xviii. 25. On this principle circumcision was an
economical recognition of the divine ownership of human life,
a part of the body being sacrificed to preserve the
remainder. But it was more than this ; otherwise it would
scarcely have asserted its claim to existence among the Jews,
when all other mutilations were strictly forbidden as
heathenish (Lev. xix. 27, xxi. 25). It can scarcely be
doubted that it was a sacrifice to the awful power upon whom
the fruit of the womb depended, and having once fixed itself
in the minds of the people, neither priest nor prophet could
eradicate it. All that these could do was to spiritualize it
into a symbol of devotion to a high religious ideal (comp.
Jer. iv. 4 ; Deut. x. 16 ; Jer. ix. 25).
In conclusion, we must
briefly refer to an analogous rite, of which women are in
many countries the subjects. It is said to consist in
mutilation of the clitoris, which is sometimes connected with
the degrading practice of infibulation. It was prevalent at
the time of Strabo (pp. 771, 824) in Arabia and in Egypt,
and, as Mr Lane attests, is still native to those regions
(Modern Egyptians, i. 73, Arabic Lexicon, s.v.
“hafada”). Carsten Niebuhr heard that it was
practised on both shores of the Persian Gulf, and at Baghdad
(Description de l’Arabie, p. 70). It appears in
some parts of West Africa, e.g., Dahomey, but it is said to
be still more common in the eastern part of that
continent.